As the demands of the portable market has pushed electronic devices smaller and lighter, the user interface devices, such as displays and keyboard input devices have set limitations on how small the devices can become. Touch screens have been used to provide combined keypad and video display but, the size of the displayed keys is limited by the requirement of the user to be able to select and the system to be able to distinguish between key presses.
As electronic devices beyond PCs and laptops continue to grow in popularity, there is a need to interact with smart-phones, tablets, TVs, game consoles, etc., more and more. While simple navigation has always been easy on these devices, it is entering data from a keyboard that has been the biggest challenge. Soft keyboards (such those found on smart phones) can be too rigid, small and lack typing feedback. Portable keyboards have to be carried around with the user defeating the purpose and/or convenience of the device.
To overcome this problem many ideas are being proposed of projecting a virtual keyboard onto the surface in front of the user (via lasers or light) or having some form of light-weight, touch interface that displays a soft keyboard for data input. These implementations, however, don't solve the root of the problems described above but are, rather, just different manifestations of them.
When typing on a virtual keyboard—whether projected onto a surface in front of the user or displayed within a touch-sensitive display—the key presses are determined by where a given finger is relative to the input device (e.g. how close to the desired key the finger pressed). This creates a hard dependency to always conform to the area, limits and behavior of the virtual device to type accurately.
Thus, there is a need in the art for a solution to allow portable devices, as well as other electronic type devices to be completely independent of any restrictions for a keyboard entry mechanism.